Milan has to be grateful for David Chipperfield gets involved once again with the “city of culture” of 2015…that’s right, Milan Expo 2015! Everything begun at 2000, when David Chipperfield Architecture studio won a competition to design the “Città delle Culture” complex in the former Ansaldo factory, located south-west of Milan in the creative district surrounding Via Tortona.

The new building is arranged as a series of interconnected rectangular volumes, while a curving-formed glass ‘lantern’ emerges at the center in contrast to the rest of the industrially-referential facility. this distinctive element shelters the museum’s atrium and creates a site organization similar to that of a traditional milanese courtyard block. David Chipperfield explains ‘given that [the surrounding buildings] are all industrial, we felt that [the street facing elevations] were not façades. actually, the interesting thing was to create an internal façade, in that you go into the building and then – like in a milan courtyard – you would find the façade.’

The central block is a curving opaque-glass hall, creating a glowing beacon at the heart of the site. Around this, the architects designed a series of boxy buildings, featuring a standing-seam cladding of zinc-titanium.